Research Paper on:
Narrative Point of View in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”

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is storytelling at its most inventive and compelling. The author elected to present a tale of small-town life in Maycomb County, Alabama during the Depression era as seen "through  a childs eyes," those of eight-year-old Jean "Scout" Finch (Lenhoff 20). As the novel unfolds, Scout becomes a wide-eyed "witness to bigotry, sexism, corrupt criminal courts, and even murder,"  which is described with astonishing candor (Books for Summer Reading 696). But despite her intelligence and obvious wisdom well beyond her years, Scout is incapable of understanding all of  the events that are unfolding around her (Lenhoff 20). Therefore, Lee incorporates a kind of dual point-of-view that is established through flashback sequences, a literary technique which allow for  alternating viewpoints between the child and now-adult Scout (Lenhoff 20). But then the point-of-view becomes even more complex when Lee provides added dimension that offers greater textual depth.  In her analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird, Claudia Durst Johnson observes, "We realize that the mature Scout is not simply recalling and interpreting the past but recalling it as  she had seen it as a child. Much of the dialogue and narrative... preserves the very young Scouts speech: it is told with the simple vocabulary and simple sentences  of a young child, often fusing ungrammatical language and childrens slang that we cant imagine the adult Scout using" (4). This enables two perception levels to emerge - "the  innocent view of the child, and the memory of the more knowing adult" (Johnson 4). Not all critics of the time were enamored of this technique, however. In  his book review for The New York Times, Frank H. Lyell wrote, "Oftentimes Scouts expository style has a processed, homogenized, impersonal flatness quite out of keeping with the narrators gay,